Gear & Gadgets —

Despite flaws, Kindle a $100m success for Amazon

Amazon's Kindle may have had uncertain prospects when it debuted, but new …

Amazon's Kindle has enjoyed apparently robust popularity since it debuted last fall; the first run of the eBook reader sold out, even at the initial $399 price point, and Amazon had only limited inventory for some time. The company later cut the unit's price to a marginally more acceptable $359, a move that must have spurred some additional sales. But how many units was Amazon actually moving? Newly-reported data suggests that Kindle sales over the past nine months may have exceeded Amazon's expectations, and made the company a killing in the process.

Exact data on Kindle sales figures has been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped on such topics, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Sitting on that information may not be an option any longer; TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon, with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures.

According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold some 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated revenue between $86 million and $96 million dollars.

Kindle's strong sales have galvanized the eBook market, and Amazon itself is developing a new series of Kindle products. The details of the update, however, have yet to be announced, which means we don't know yet if we'll see a hardware/software refresh of the existing Kindle, a new "Kindle 2.0" hardware design, or a new, student-oriented Kindle aimed directly at the textbook market.

Priced properly, Kindle could become an overnight sensation in the education market, even at the current initial price of $359. College textbook prices can easily hit $500 or more in a single semester; a one-time fee for Kindle that lowered total book bills would be the ultimate no-brainer for a gadget-loving college freshman.

Dead tree not quite dead

As we noted in our initial review, Kindle isn't perfect, and hopefully Amazon will address some of the device's shortcomings in whatever update it releases. But even as it plows ahead with plans to mainstream and then conquer the e-book market, Amazon isn't done with dead tree yet.

Amazon, meanwhile, appears bent on increasing its own library of titles. The company on Friday bought Canadian used bookseller AbeBooks, which claims to list over 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. Indeed, my own first experience of the site came years ago when a roommate discovered that he could order bizarrely obscure missionary documents from Pakistan, India, and Africa, and he proceeded to do so at great expense. His dissertation, however, was better for this new trove of data, and the rest of us were educated about what postage from the far parts of the globe looked like.

AbeBooks will remain a stand-alone operation headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia.

Already a force in used bookselling, Amazon's acquisition of a major player in the field means the company wants to solidify its hold on that market even as it adopts digital features like Search Inside the Book to hawk new books and pushes a new device in order to dominate e-books sales. Is it any wonder that book publishers simultaneously love and fear the company?